Used car prices have been heading in the right direction after months of elevated values and inventory shortages. Even so, the values of some vehicles have declined much faster than others, with EVs doing the heavy lifting. Automotive data outfit iSeeCars’ latest study looked at used car values over the past year, finding that used electric vehicles are dropping at a much faster rate than their gas-powered counterparts.
While used car values have been dropping overall over the past year, used EVs have dropped like a stone in comparison. iSeeCars found that the average for used electric models fell by up to almost 32 percent since 2023, while the used gas vehicle average price sank by just 3.6 percent.
All these stories about ev depreciation don’t take into account that many ev’s originally sold with a $7,500 rebate in the US. When you remove that from the depreciation, it doesn’t look nearly as bad.
Yeah, I wanted to buy a used EV in France but i ended up buying new because the prices were way too high for used vehicles.
Also, they weren’t the only ones but used EVs where ridiculously priced for a couple of years there.
This is good news for broke people like me. With the used ev credit I can get into an ev for under 15k with a few years left on the battery warranty.
The volatility of gasoline prices can be a huge blow to poor households.
When did they start giving credits on used EVs? I bought one around 7 years ago and the credit was for new cars only. That credit was part of the reason why the used values tanked, because the state recaptured the credit through excessive registration fees. My annual registration was 3x higher on my EV than my gas car.
This year there is a 4k credit on used evs 2022 or older in the US. Some states have equal or greater rebates, you can get up to 9k off in some places. It’s wild and there’s going to be a LOT of savvy lower income people reducing their transportation costs in the next year.
That’s awesome! I sure wish that would have been available when I bought my car. I loved the car, but I lost over half its value in the 2.5 years I owned it, which is unprecedented for certified pre-owned recent model cars.
It’s not really surprising. A large portion of an EV’s pricetag is the battery pack, and that’s a wear part. Kind of like buying a used cellphone: if the battery is half spent and it won’t hold a charge for a whole day, it’s not really worth buying at all. Not to mention, even if the car is reasonably recent, you don’t know if the owner let the battery deep-discharge or drove it in super-cold weather and damaged it even more than normal use and aging would. In a regular vehicle, you can assess the condition of the major parts. In an EV, you can’t really tell if the battery is hosed before it’s too late.
In other words, an EV is something you want to buy new, to make sure you know its history, and to get its best years of service out of it.
That may be part of it, but I’d say another big force is more competition in the EV market.
We went from almost no competition to most major auto brands having new offerings.
Further, the general price of an EV has highly fluctuated which does not help. It has inverted a couple of times which will make people hold off buying used when new might be cheaper.
Yeah I agree, battery degradation has very little to do with it. I was about to buy a used EV until Ford dropped mach e prices recently. I ended up getting a new car for less than used listings.
Early last year, Tesla dropped their Model Y pricing by $10,000. Sunk the value of all used Model Ys overnight. I think other EVs have had price cuts as well. This probably had more impact on the used market than anything else.
The people that paid over MSRP for used cars during covid years are bellyaching now that a) prices have returned to pre-covid levels and b) new $7500 rebate (tesla has used up all their rebates under the old program)
It’s not really surprising. A large portion of an EV’s pricetag is the battery pack, and that’s a wear part.
It’s as much a “wear part” as the engine, transmission, or any other component.
I suppose unless the instrumentation is built into the car’s systems (no idea if it is or not), it may be difficult or time consuming to check the health of an EV battery pack. But it’s not like you can eyeball the cylinder compression of an ICE car, either. I suspect that since they’re a relatively new tech, the tools and tricks aren’t widely known for evaluating them. You would have to measure the voltage drop on the battery vs current draw and have baseline data to compare that to. I would think EVs would track power usage (otherwise how do you know when to charge the vehicle?) and so they should be able to estimate the AH capacity of the battery?
Couple of thoughts here:
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This is new technology, and every generation makes huge advancements over the last. That means the previous gens lose value quickly. Most notably, currently we are seeing a slow shift to the NACS charging standard. But obviously other improvements in battery density and charging speeds.
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We’re just recovering from crazy inflation of EV prices. New prices (particularly Tesla) have fallen precipitously, which drives down the value of used cars.
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These are not accounting for state or federal incentives that only apply to EVs.
I wouldn’t call it new technology. Manufacturers just keep overcomplicating things and introducing additional points of failure and the advancements are mainly in built in spying tech.
The diy conversions are still my preference having to date tested 8 different manufactured EVs and 4 diy builds.
Manufacturers are all deluded though. If they just made a basic everyman’s ev with no bells and whistles, standard basic replaceable 2din head unit, 2 front speakers but mount points and prewired for rear speakers like the base level Honda configurations of days gone by, then they would guaranteed sell a whole fuckload of those and more than enough people would easily get roped into paying extra for the optionals and the people that don’t are the ones who otherwise wouldn’t have bought a new car at all. Instead they deck everything out in dumb shit that nobody wants and jack up the prices like ram and hard drive prices for apple computers.
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